The late 1970s were an interesting time for microcomputers. The rousing success of things like the 8080, the Z80, the 6800, and the 6502 made everyone wanted a piece of the action. National Semiconductor produced its SC/MP. That was technically the Simple Cost-effective Micro Processor, but it was commonly known as Scamp. There were several […]
Over on his YouTube channel [Construction General] shows us how to convert a drain into a hydropower facility. This type of hydroelectric facility is known as a gravitation water vortex power plant. The central structure is a round basin which includes a central drain. The water feeds into the basin through a series of pipes […]
It wasn’t that long ago that projects with cellular connectivity were everywhere, but with 2G no longer universally available, glory days of cheap 2G modules seem to be on their way out. So when [Data Slayer] titled his video “You’ve Never Seen Cellular Like This” about a new GSM radio module, we couldn’t help but […]
One of the practical upsides of improved computer vision systems and machine learning has been the ability of computers to translate text from one language or format to another. [Jchen] used this to develop Braille Vision which can turn inaccessible text into braille on the go. Using a headless Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 running […]
We often think that if a piece of software had the level of documentation you usually see for hardware, you wouldn’t think much of it. Sure, there are exceptions. Some hardware is beautifully documented, and poorly documented software is everywhere. [Graham Sutherland’s] been reviewing schematics and put together some notes on what makes a clean […]
Around the globe, some classrooms are using fancy digital handheld devices to let people answer questions. One such example of this hardware is the Smart Response PE. These devices are largely useless outside the classroom, so [Ray Burne] decided to hack one for our 2025 One Hertz Challenge. The Smart Response PE device is similar […]
Over on his YouTube channel our hacker [GrandpaAmu] liberates a collapsible chair from a single piece of wood. With the assistance of an extra pair of hands, but without any power tools in sight, this old master marks up a piece of wood and then cuts a collapsible chair out of it. He uses various […]
How fast does your heart beat? It’s a tough question to answer, because our heart rate changes all the time depending on what we’re doing and how our body is behaving. However, [Ludwin] noted that resting heart rates often settle somewhere near 60 bpm on average. Thus, they entered a heart rate sensor to our […]